A garden is a safe place, a pretty place, after all; you’d be happy to let your children play in the garden. And it suggests ideas of growing and cultivation and training, of bringing things up, of nurturing them in the greenhouse to the point where they’re hardy enough to stay outside; and also of keeping them in order, of making sure they look tidy, and so on. There are all kinds of reasons to associate children and their literature with gardens.
So when I was asked to speak about children’s literature I looked for a garden metaphor to start me off, but I couldn’t make it work; because what kept coming to mind was the crazy disordered garden in that little scrap of genius, The Great Panjandrum:
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. “What? no soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber: and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the great Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
(SAMUEL FOOTE, 1755)
Well, there was my garden metaphor. What could I do with it? This isn’t one of those safe gardens, where all the plants behave predictably; if you want an apple pie here, you have to pick a cabbage leaf. And people can die suddenly—from shock, one presumes. What’s more, dangerous and explosive substances are casually sprinkled around the floor. It shouldn’t be allowed. Someone should stop it.
But of course someone’s trying to: the great she-bear is demanding cleanliness and trying to keep order. She’s obviously one of those security guards in disguise, or perhaps a school inspector, and the only effect she has is to cause the death of an innocent bystander.
But the consolation is that nobody takes any notice at all, and the wedding goes ahead, imprudent or not, and the game of catch-as-catch-can is still going on, as far as I can tell. When I find it, I shall join in.
THIS TALK WAS DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE, 6 DECEMBER 2001.
The idea of borders, and frontiers, and guards, and customs regulations, and all the paraphernalia of passports and visas and “letters of transit” (the imaginary papers required by the protagonists of the film Casablanca before they could leave for Lisbon and safety), is full of metaphorical implication. And in these days of Brexit and the politically induced paranoia about hordes of refugees who are all probably terrorists, the desire to “regain control of our borders” seems to flourish. The point I’d still like to make is that all that apparatus of suspicion doesn’t help us to get on together. In some parts of the world, it’s becoming harder and harder for writers to publish their work without the threat of imprisonment or worse, which isn’t a metaphor at all.
Let’s Write It in Red
THE PRACTICE OF WRITING
On writing as a game with rules, including rules for the beginnings and endings, the making-up parts and the writing-down parts—and how not everything should be written in red
I am very honoured to have been asked to give the Patrick Hardy Lecture. I never knew Patrick Hardy, but as a reader of Signal I’ve been aware of the quality of the previous lectures and of the many merits of those who gave them, all of them distinguished and unfailingly interesting commentators on this large world of ours, the world of children’s books. And I say “large world” without the slightest irony: I have said before that children’s books, for various reasons, at this time in our literary history, open out on a wideness and amplitude—a moral and mental spaciousness—that adult literary fiction seems to have turned its back on. But I’m not going to rehearse that argument again tonight; instead I’m going to start with a story, continue with a look at some principles of storytelling, and end with a confession.
The story is a true one, and it happened to me—or rather I witnessed it—about a year ago. (And that sentence itself illustrates part of the fascinating difficulty of talking about story. The story, of course, didn’t happen: the events happened. The story happened later, when I picked out certain of the events and told them. And I’ve told them several times since, because I think they’re fascinating, but tonight I’m going to think about the implications of them in a more coherent way.)
I was on a train going from Oxford to Newcastle. The carriage was crowded, and sitting near me was a young woman who had six children to look after. I don’t think they were all her own: I think some of them were cousins, so she was both mum and auntie. There was a baby who was being fed, and there was a four-year-old with a huge bag of crisps, so they were happily occupied; and there were two boys of roughly eleven who were swapping football stickers, so they were all right; and there were two girls, I guess about eight or nine, who didn’t have anything to do, and who were a bit restless.
So the mother gave them some coloured pencils and a pad of paper and said, “Why don’t you write a story?”
My eyes were firmly fixed on what I was reading, namely the papers concerning the Centre for the Children’s Book (now known as Seven Stories), which was what I was going to Newcastle for; but the magpie who sits in every storyteller’s head turned his beady-eyed attention at once to what the girls were doing. “What can we steal from this?” he said. “What can we copy? What can we use?”
(Actually, the roosting space in my head is shared between the magpie and another bird: that dusty, broken-down, out-of-date old owl who used to be a teacher. And he opened an eye too, and cocked an ear, if owls can do that, to see what these girls had been taught.)
They began by deciding what their heroine should be called, and where she should live, and the names of her friends, and what school she went to, and all that. And then they got down to writing the opening of the story, and then one of the little girls said to the other, “Are we allowed to write that she can do magic?”
That’s exactly what she said: not, “Let’s write that she can do magic” but, “Are we allowed?”
The owl opened both eyes. The magpie cocked his head even more intently.
Anyway, they decided that their heroine could do magic, and they wrote a page or so, agreeing what should happen as they went along. The owl was pleased to see that they wrote neatly and punctuated appropriately, and they could even do paragraphs. The magpie was trying to read upside down.
Then the second girl said, “I know! When we come to an exciting bit, let’s write it in red!”
And at this point the magpie and the owl turned to each other in awe. I think I’ll put the bird metaphor to sleep now, because both those parts of me were fully joined with all the rest, and my respect for these great eight- or nine-year-old artists was such that I would have asked for their autographs, if I had dared; but they got out at the next stop, and I never had the chance to hear any more.
Now you can see what I’m going to derive from this story. The girls’ comments embody two great principles of storytelling, and I’m going to expand on those and then add a third principle which I think was already implicit in their activity, if not their words.
The first principle is this: there are rules.
Because this was an activity freely engaged in, something to pass the time, a game, fun. It wasn’t homework. It wasn’t a task set by a teacher in order to satisfy some requirement of that great blight in Britain, that educational murrain, the National Curriculum for schools. They could do with it exactly what they liked. And yet she said, “Are we allowed to write such-and-such?” No one would have chastised her, or given her poor marks, if she had done what was not allowed; she wanted to know what was allowed, not so that she could avoid punishment, but so that she could do it. She wanted to play the game properly.
We need to be a little careful with this analogy between storytelling and games, because in most games you’re playing against an opponent, and the object of the game is to beat th
em. That isn’t the case with storytelling, unless we consider every storyteller to be an avatar of Scheherazade, the opponent being the Sultan (or the listener or reader in general, or the critic) and the object of the game being to stop them killing you (or putting the book down, or giving you a bad review). That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that storyteller and audience collaborate in a game of let’s-pretend. But let’s-pretend has rules as well: you can’t pretend a new thing without telling the others, for instance.
And as we know about all games, it’s much more satisfying to play with rules than without them. If we’re going to enjoy a game of football in the playground, we need to know where the touchline is, and agree on what we’re going to regard as the goalposts. Then we can get on with playing, because the complete freedom of our play is held together and protected by this armature of rules. The first and last and only discovery that the victims of anarchy can make is: no rules, no freedom.
So here are some of the rules of story, as I understand and try to follow them. They’re only in a rough order, and this list isn’t by any means complete—I don’t suppose any such list ever could be, because it would shade off into the fatuous at one end and the numinous at the other—but these are the rules I myself have found most helpful.
My first rule is that stories must begin. Out of the welter of events and ideas and pictures and characters and voices that you experience in your head, you the storyteller must choose one moment, the best moment, and make that the start. You could begin anywhere in the chronology, of course; you could begin in the middle, in medias res, as Homer does; you could begin at the end of it if you wanted to, as J. G. Ballard does in one of his short stories, with the character’s death, and work towards his birth. But unless you are writing one of those rather dated experimental loose-leaf collections of pages to be shuffled and read in any order, one of your pages is going to be the first page, and one of your sentences is going to be the first sentence. So: where are you going to start, and what are you going to say?
At this point I’m going to introduce a notion from the world of science which I’ve mentioned on other occasions. I read more about science than I understand, but I’ve always thought that one of its many great gifts to us is the cornucopia of metaphor it provides for discussing the arts. The notion I want to metaphorise is phase space. Phase space is a term from dynamics. It’s the notional space which contains not just the actual consequences of the present moment, but all the possible consequences. The phase space of a game of noughts and crosses, for instance, would contain every possible outcome of every possible initial move, and the actual course of a game could be represented by a path starting from the one move that was actually made first.
So the opening of your story brings with it a phase space. For example:
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
You have to make the first mark somewhere. You have to open a story at some point. The first sentence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by taking up the position it does towards Alice, by letting us know her firm, decided, no-nonsense view of what kind of book is no use, opens up many possibilities and closes many others. It establishes the fact that we are going to know her thoughts; that doesn’t mean we won’t know other characters’ thoughts, but it does mean that that first privilege won’t be withdrawn. We are with Alice: our stance is sympathetic.
(I have a personal rule that’s a variation of this: I never start a story with a pronoun. “She stood at the window, gazing down at the…” If I read a story like that, I’m irritated before I begin. Who stood at the window? What’s her name? How am I supposed to know who she is?)
The next rule I want to talk about concerns consistency. When my colleague on the train said, “Are we allowed to write that she can do magic?” what she meant was, “Within the game of this particular story, is such-and-such a move permitted?” Putting it another way, would such-and-such a move violate a unity or destroy a mood or contradict a proposition?
Notice, this isn’t a warning against subverting expectations. It’s more to do with having a sense of what sort of story it is that you’re telling, and being true to the vision of it, and not sticking something in from another kind of story altogether because it makes it easier.
This unity is part of what we look for and enjoy in, for example, Arthur Ransome. We know perfectly well that in Swallows and Amazons there’s going to be no fairy dust on Wild Cat Island. He is very firmly not allowed to write that Captain Nancy can do magic. And what authority is it that grants or withholds the permission? Simply the rest of the story, the authority of the context, and especially the storyteller’s sense of it. Ransome’s awareness of what he’s doing is so secure that even if the notion of a little bit of magic to get him out of a hole (and we know from his letters that he frequently lamented the difficulty of getting his plots to move satisfactorily)—even if the notion fluttered like a moth at the very edge of his attention, his storyteller’s sense of what was proper would swat it away without his even beginning to consider it consciously.
Another requirement is consistency of tone. For example, open Leon Garfield where you like, you won’t find a page of sober dullness anywhere. Fantastical gloom, yes; grimness illuminated by shafts of grotesque humour, certainly; a darkness as profound and velvety as the black of an old mezzotint, by all means; but nothing sober, nothing drab, nothing workaday. The exuberance is all of a piece: even a first paragraph that begins like a travel guide twirls upwards into a rococo curlicue of imagery:
Eastward in Clerkenwell lies the Mulberry Pleasure Garden…lamps hang glimmering in the trees and scores of moths flap and totter in the shadowy green, imagining themselves star-drunk…
The Pleasure Garden (Viking, 1976). There, by the way, is a book that ought never to be unavailable. The way to celebrate children’s literature is not to print postage stamps showing Noddy and Big Ears but to spend a little money to keep books by great writers in print. A smaller, poorer country than ours would do it. So should we.
Garfield knew what he was doing, and that’s the rule I mean: have a sense of the kind of story you’re telling, and then you’ll know whether or not you’re allowed to write that she can do magic. And part of this sense is a sense of what you yourself, as a storyteller, are good at. You’ll discover, if you think about what you’re doing, whether you’re good at the funny stuff or the thrilling stuff or the six-handkerchief stuff. Cultivate your own abilities first, become certain of your command in one field, and then you can begin to extend your range.
Now here’s a very important rule. It’s so important I’ve written it on a piece of paper and stuck it above my desk. It says: “Don’t be afraid of the obvious.”
Because it’s very tempting, once you’ve begun to tell stories seriously, to over-complicate. Part of the reason for this, I think, is the natural wish of everyone who aspires to be a good writer not to be mistaken for a bad one. You don’t want them to think you’re writing trash, so you try to avoid the stock situations, the stereotyped characters, the second-hand plot devices, all the obvious things that trashy books are full of. But the habit of resistance has to be supervised and kept in check. Your “built-in, shockproof bullshit detector,” as Hemingway called it, is a good servant but a bad master. It should warn, not decide. If you rely too much on it, your main concern will no longer be to tell a story but instead to make it perfectly clear that you’re too exquisite and fastidious to be taken in by any trite, common little idea. One result of this wish to avoid the obvious is the sort of wincing mannered affectation that, for me, disfigures far too much fiction by people who are praised for how clever their fiction is: picking up your story wi
th a pair of tongs, as I once put it. “Oh dear, yes,” as E. M. Forster said: “the novel tells a story.”
If I can briefly quote an example from my own work where I stopped myself from avoiding the obvious: in The Golden Compass there’s a bear. I knew from the start he would have to be even more formidable than a real polar bear, so he’s an armoured bear, but I didn’t know how formidable he’d be till he turned up and began to speak. And as soon as he did, the idea came: why not make him not just any bear but the king of the bears? And in exile? Because then I could have him fight to regain his throne. And Lyra the heroine could help, and that in turn would strengthen her own story—and so on.
And almost at once that voice at my shoulder said, “No! Don’t be silly. That’s far too obvious. Everyone’ll predict that. It’s been done a hundred times. No—what you want is to give it a twist. Let him pretend to help her, but really let her down. Let him seem to be a brave bear, but in fact be a coward. Don’t go for the obvious.”
But fortunately I know how to resist that voice now, and I looked at my piece of paper, and I did the obvious thing, and I think the story is better for it. The same impulse came to me with Lyra’s parents: Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are her father and mother, but that’s obvious, isn’t it? Much cleverer to make her think they are and then reveal that they’re not, or something. But I resisted that too. We shouldn’t be afraid of the obvious, because stories are about life, and life is full of obvious things like food and sleep and love and courage which you don’t stop needing just because you’re a good reader.
There are many other rules, which I could spend a lot of time on, such as the one that says Whatever doesn’t add, subtracts, and the one that says The pluperfect is not the right tense to tell stories in, and the three very interesting laws of the Quest: the protagonist’s task must be hard to do, it must be easy to understand, and a great deal must hang on the outcome…But I’ll just mention one more. It has to do with what I call “the path through the wood,” the line taken by the story through the world it exists in. And a path is a path to: it has a destination.
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